Why Decentralization Matters (2018)
cdixon.org
cdixon.org
1. Today's internet is decentralized because people can't run their own web, smtp, nntp, xmpp, servers, WP blogs. Which is true, we can't expect people to run this the same way we can't expect every car owner to have a mechanic shop.
2. The proposals for "web3", to the best of my understanding, require people to run their own blockchain nodes, manage wallets, etc.
Based on our collective experience in (1), how does anyone believe that (2) is a reasonable proposal? Handling these over to someone else will just result in another new set of platforms that web3 proponents so desperately want to run away from.
Not to mention someone still needs to actually run the servers, reintroducing the same complexity from (1).
That Filecoin thing is a great example. Yeah, I want to store my mission critical data on a bunch of EoL, consumer grade hard disks that someone is using to participate in the blockchain. /s
And no regulation isn't the utopia the crypto enthusiasts are selling. Don't completely unregulated systems typically end up dominated by the richest, most ruthless, least ethical participants?
Scientifically Web3 consists of: peer-to-peer technology (e.g. Bittorrent) with a distributed ledger (e.g. Bitcoin) and the social practice of sharing (e.g. Github). This will take 10-15 years more to develop further. The startups are very noisy and are now discovering that doing real "distributed systems" is very hard. They consistently cheat by using central servers. Adversarial Byzantine attacks are unsolved (or require wasteful proof-of-work to yield no performance).
2 out of 3 of those things (minus distributed ledger) has been around for about 20 years now. Y'know, The Pirate Bay and others?
With a properly decentralised network any node can be taken down without taking down the entire network.
Not all public DLTs are born equal however. Leaderless networks which are not vulnerable to DDOS attacks are the dream.
Not single points of failure, but a few major (AWS, GCP, Azure, Cloudflare) points of failure.
Take any one or more of these down and there are major disruptions in commerce, connectivity and communications.
Sure, there are other hosting providers, but there's far too much centralization of Internet resources on those four platforms.
Any real decentralization solution will require ubiquitous (multi-)gigabit symmetric links to/from the Internet on commercial and consumer connections.
Because if you don't have enough bandwidth, you'll need to host your content/resources in "the cloud" (read: someone else's servers). And that locks all of us into centralized platforms.
tl;dr: If you want real decentralization, you need to provide the resources to do so at all levels of the networking/application stack.
Edit: Fixed usage: Symmetric vs. synchronous.
> A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working.
Internet doesn't have a single point of failure. People that depends on X with X being the major clouds may be considered a point of failure for your specific application, but that's just your application, not the internet itself. Internet is already decentralized by nature.
> Sure, there are other hosting providers, but there's far too much centralization of Internet resources on those four platforms.
Because it's convenient. Decentralization has a constant cost. Centralization benefits from economics of scale.
> Because if you don't have enough bandwidth, you'll need to host your content/resources in "the cloud" (read: someone else's servers). And that locks all of us into centralized platforms.
Peer-to-peer solutions work fine, and you don't need multi gigabit synchronous links for that.
What Web3 seems to be trying to do is to have the convinience of centralization with the resilience of decentralization. For example, distributed authentity and payments. That's a great and noble goal! But I wish people would come forward about that and the tradeoffs involved instead of just talking about decentralization. Internet is decentralized by nature.
Not single points of failure, but a few major
(AWS, GCP, Azure, Cloudflare) points of failure.
Take any one or more of these down and there are
major disruptions in commerce, connectivity and
communications.
>Because it's convenient. Decentralization has a constant cost. Centralization benefits from economics of scale.
But there are costs to that centralization too. Not measured in dollars, but in freedom, creativity and choice.
>Peer-to-peer solutions work fine, and you don't need multi gigabit synchronous links for that.
Do they? If that were the case, we wouldn't have these behemoth tech corporations.
Decentralized solutions exist, but aren't currently viable for a variety of reasons. I chose to pick on asymmetric network links (the asymmetric part is the important bit, not necessarily total bandwidth, although that's important too) as a blocker to decentralization.
Feel free to disagree, but decentralization needs to be about more than just distributed block chains and services hosted on centralized server plantations.
Edit: Fixed usage: Asymmetric, not asynchronous. Sorry, still drinking coffee here.
[1]: https://infura.io/
Least of all: require escrow-held-micro-payment to send an email to some location. If the item is marked as spam, the sender loses their money (perhaps to the spam-filter maintainer).
one does not correlate with the other.
if anything, the strongest incentive is to mask centralized ownership behind a screen of decentralized infrastructure.
a culture of anonymity helps discourage inconvenient questions about transparency and thwarts attempts to formally analyze the relationship between agents and principals in a blockchain network.
all cryptocurrencies are thus fundamentally based on deception, as the blockchain is designed to expose activity statistics that demonstrate 'decentralization' of agency, but anonymizes the linkage between agent and principal, making those statistics worse than meaningless.
AFAIK, the proposal is to use federation, i.e., only those who can/want run servers, whereas normal users use those federated servers.
The lesson is that when you compare centralized and decentralized systems you need to consider them dynamically, as processes, instead of statically, as rigid products. Centralized systems often start out fully baked, but only get better at the rate at which employees at the sponsoring company improve them.
Centralized platforms often come bundled at launch with compelling apps: Facebook had its core socializing features and the iPhone had a number of key apps. Decentralized platforms, by contrast, often launch half-baked and without clear use cases. As a result, they need to go through two phases of product-market fit: 1) product-market fit between the platform and the developers/entrepreneurs who will finish the platform and build out the ecosystem, and 2) product-market fit between the platform/ecosystem and end users. This two-stage process is what causes many people — including sophisticated technologists — to consistently underestimate the potential of decentralized platforms.
- Building a decentralized platform is technically more complex than a centralized one. So it requires more developer resources for a feature that users don't care too much about. It's also harder to iterate, because you're spending much more time in building a design consensus for new features instead of just rolling it.
- Centralized platforms also have to work out the product-market fit between platform and developers. Mobile? Twitter apps (the Twitter API was a big reason that drove adoption at the beginning)? WP blogs?
- Decentralized platforms will have technical limitations and hurdles that will probably hurt user experience. For example, harder discovery, diverging features, delays, data consistency...
So when he says "The question of whether decentralized or centralized systems will win the next era of the internet reduces to who will build the most compelling products", that's true, but avoids mentioning the fact that, resources being equal, compelling decentralized systems will be considerably harder and slower to build. And this is not new, which is the point I made in my comment. Nothing about crypto changes these facts.
The people who are invested in crypto and think it's the future. They do the same reasoning all the time: crypto can be used for X, so X will be done now! Thinking about why X wasn't done before is not something they do.
There was another thread in the last day or two about someone asking where to get a dumb TV. In that discussion it became clear to me that there's already mesh networks all over the place without people realizing it, or if there's not, there could be. The only difference is it's being used by Amazon, Samsung et al to connect their devices and talk about you than to enable you to do something on a peer-to-peer service. I'm not saying it's easy, or that it could happen, but it seems like if peoples' routers or IoT hubs or whatever came with P2P stuff in the box with an easy UX it could move things along?
I generally think IoT/home security hubs/smarthome hubs etc are plagued by vendor lock-in, and I wouldn't be surprised if someday it got dropped in favor of something more standard. At that point I could see P2P maybe coming baked in? Not sure.
Twitter is basically RSS for the masses, cloud is just remote servers for the masses, I suspect decentralized/P2P for the masses is just a UX problem too.
Lots of things happen in steps too, from more hardcore tech crowds to the general population. Email was once the realm of college students and defense people only, and the web was a curiosity.
The problem is lock in. Running proprietary software still has the problem, even on your own hardware. The idea is to have everything run to spec/protocol, with mechanisms preventing customised behaviour - the issue is similar to the problems within bit-torrent wrt custom clients not behaving correct i.e. not maintaining ratio, which meant there needed to be a decentralised mechanism for managing this across-network.
The idea is it doesn't matter so much who runs the software or what they run - the network protocol maintains the peace.
Bring back the use of open protocols, add IPv6 support throughout and add a sprinkling of peer-to-peer.
If payments / incentives are required, then Bitcoin can be used. For example, there's decentralized Sphinx Chat which runs on the Bitcoin lightning network: https://sphinx.chat
I haven't seen any of the 'cryptojunk' tokens implement an actual service like the Sphinx chat, which is quite telling in my opinion.
Micropayments and nanopayments require thousands and tens of thousands TPS. There are newer generations of crypto that can do that and with none of the energy consumption problems of Bitcoin and other Proof of Work systems.
IMHO, if we’re gonna do cryptocurrency, we should try to make as many transactions as possible on layer 1.
You can send money to/from Chivo using Bitcoin; but the settlement of that beer purchase would not involve Bitcoin network at all.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58727b5a9de4bb...
Running your own servers is attractive for some, but they aren’t the majority and never will be unless it requires something as simple as buying a $35 box and plugging it in at home with no additional setup. Social media is hard to accomplish without a centralized discovery server. See Torrents before they figured out a mechanism or Matrix.
The author didn’t address these forces driving web content to centralized platforms, and web3 isn’t likely to avoid the same incentive structure from what I can tell. Bitcoin and Ethereum both have significant centralization problems for how people use them. More wallets are in Coinbase and other central providers than are run privately. Mining power is centralized among a small population as well. Even current crypto is driving toward centralization to get new people onto the technology, so how do you prevent it in web3?
A decentralized system driving to centralization is much better than centralized overlords having a full control over users in a walled garden reinforced by network effects. As TFA says, "Decentralized networks aren’t a silver bullet that will fix all the problems on the internet. But they offer a much better approach than centralized systems."
> Running your own servers is attractive for some, but they aren’t the majority and never will be
And it's not necessary as the existing servers federate between each other and allow the users to register normally.
Why wouldn't this happen with web3 servers?
Why doesn't HTTP count as decentralized? Anyone can put a server on the network by buying an IP and domain name. And how does crypto help at all with these basic network effect problems that are the reason previous decentralized systems centralized?
It can happen with them, and it does happen with Bitcoin to a degree. However, it's much better than full monopoly of Facebook and Youtube. By the way, there are still many alternative paid email providers which work fine for those who do not want to run their own server.
>Why doesn't HTTP count as decentralized?
To me it does. But we need more: we need decentralized services on top of it, like PeerTube.
Also, Wikipedia has shown that centralization is necessary sometimes. For example, political pages are frequently locked because people with the most extreme and inaccurate viewpoints are the most vocal.
He started by talking about the good old days. He clearly identifies the issues of crypto and that there was nothing wrong with open protocols besides speed to market (which is easier to fix than the snafu of crypto)
He identified Wikipedia vs Encarta and Wikipedia is a success but has nothing to do with crypto.
There are so many issues with blockchains compared to publishing RFCs and pushing an opensource client as a scout... it boggles my mind.
Instead, people are educated on how to use useless NFT's and how to burn their time trading air on binance. Web3.0 is the definition of vanity.
All of the tools required for freedom are there. You just need to have the honesty and willingness to use them. Instead everybody waits for some web3.0 magic, which will make everybody rich.
Edit: typos
BTW, original discussion on this article from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16410478
Does being open contribution warrant the use of the word "decentralised"? as far as I can tell it's still a huge success story from a centralisation perspective.
The website where the efforts were finally consolidated was a central place, but it could very well have been developed as a network of nodes dedicated to different aspects of the explanation of areas of knowledge; the license allowed that. And the growth was initially not coordinated from a central place, an anarchic community began working on different areas and only later began coordinating by building top level behavior policies (as intended).
This is a remarkable framing that skirts around the fact that Wikipedia started as a single project and website and remains a single project and website today. Neither crowdsourcing content nor having a permissive license require or even imply decentralisation of any kind.
That's only true if you don't consider "crowdsourcing" and "open sourcing" as forms of decentralization on themselves. A project based on those foundations will necessarily have a less centralised and controlling leadership than one based on the concept of ownership and copy rights, because it cannot prevent decisions being made by multiple actors and not just the governing board.
I don't see any better arguments, development put forth since then
Web3 and NFTs are interesting only in that they're so nonsensical even a large chunk of crypto believers can't bring themselves to buy into them.
Meanwhile, PeerTube v4 release candidate is out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29390312.
I prefer 'consensual' to 'democratic'. Most blockchain-based systems are consensual in that they operate based on rules that enjoy the unanimous consent of everyone they apply to. If I and everyone I want to interact with via a blockchain agrees to change the rules, we can freely do so, but if someone doesn't agree, we either have to stop interacting or come to an agreement.
I strongly believe political fights should be avoided whenever possible because they are (at best) win-lose. Political fights are about who should get to control everyone or what everyone should be forced to do. Technological solutions can sometimes allow everyone to get what they want without imposing their vision and preferences on others.
https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/decentralized-woo.html
Web3 is not Decentralisation
https://medium.com/@rossstalker_5939/web3-is-not-decentralis...
This struck a nerve. The internet is most certainly hardware based. While distributed databases are great, there is an extraordinary system of hardware that will always need to be produced, maintained, and powered to keep such databases operational.
You don't need blockchain for decentralized services, just look at peertube, mastadon, etc. NFT identity etc might be a useful addition, but decentralized services don't need to be 'built on' so-called 'web 3.0'.